Jan Verwoert

In Search of the Miraculous (One Work)

Bas Jan Ader

et al.

Jean-Michel Ribettes

Christoph Blase

Art at the turn of the millennium

Catherine Wood

Suzanne Cotter

Silke Otto-Knapp

Silke Otto-Knapp works with watercolour and gouache paints on canvas, building up and breaking down the painted surface to create works of subtle effect. Her paintings and drawings explore the interplay of rural and urban aesthetics while illuminating her characters' quotidian experience. Inspired by theatre sets and botanical gardens, these dreamlike compositions are populated by ghostly figures, shadows, and open-aired amphitheatres. This catalogue surveys Otto-Knapp's paintings from the past five years, in which staged figures and landscapes are at the centre of her explorations into the construction of pictorial space. Published on the occasion of the exhibitions (July ndash; September 2009) Present time exercise at the Museum of Modern Art Oxford, and Standing anywhere in the space in a relaxed position at the Banff Centre, Alberta, Canada. English text.

Present Time Exercise

Wolfgang Tillmans

Midori Matsui

Phaidon Press

Peter Halley

Caroline Stephen

Peter Verwoert

An in-depth look at the iconic work of the internationally recognized photographer.

This first compilation of writings by art critic Jan Verwoert galvanizescentral themes he has been developing in pursuit of a language todescribe art's transformative potential in conceptual, performative andemotional terms. He analyzes the power of public gestures toconstitute communities as well as the pressure to perform that governsthe sphere of creative labor, in order to show how particular artistsperform gestures and invoke community differently. Exploring theemotional power games that shape social relations, Verwoert looks foran alternative ethos of action and feeling, asking: How can a modernistapproach to artistic form as a means of social critique be expandedto fully avow its subliminal affective undercurrents, and produce apleasurably crooked form of criticality in art and writing?

Tell Me what You Want, what You Really, Really Want

Eva Grubinger

Dark matter

Providing a snapshot of contemporary art practice in Britain, this book explores a significant theme emerging from the work of the artists selected: the appropriation and re-casting of cultural material. A short essay accompanies the work of each of the thirty artists featured.

New British Art

Tate Triennial 2006

Laura Hoptman

Bruce Hainley

Born in Germany and based in London, Tomma Abts has received considerable acclaim for her paintings and drawings. Her work has been shown at such major international exhibitions as the Berlin Biennial (2006) and the Carnegie International (2004), as well as at prestigious museums across Europe, including Kunsthalle Basel (2005) and Van Abbemuseum (2004). In 2006 she was awarded the Turner Prize. Each Tomma Abts painting is the result of an intuitive process, a complex operation of addition and substraction. Within rigid parameters - unvarying materials and size - she conjures a progression of shapes and colours, building layer upon layer of seemingly spontaneous geometry until the work reaches its culmination: an abstract arrangement in perfect tension. This volume, the artist's first extensive monograph, provides a comprehensive survey of her work, with full-colour images of thirty-seven paintings, and eighteen drawings, as well as three specially commissioned essays. In the first essay, Laura Hoptman dismantles abstraction's historical framework to illustrate the uniqueness of Abts' approach. Jan Verwoert meditates on the subversive power of contemplation, findind in Abts' artistic process a validation of 'the beauty of latency.' And Bruce Hainley gazes at Abts' work through the fictional eyes of Margit Carstensen - actress, muse, and star of Rainer Werner Fassbinder's The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant.

Tomma Abts

An illustrated investigation into the critical motives behind the last, unfinished work that has defined the romantic legacy of conceptual artist Bas Jan Ader. In 1975 Bas Jan Ader disappeared at sea while trying to sail from the East Coast of the United States to Europe as part of a project titled In Search of the Miraculous. Ader's considerable influence on later conceptual artists stems from the way in which he used the cool analytic and antisubjective aesthetics of conceptual art to explore experiences that would seem definitively subjective—the emotional intensity of tragedy and the romantic quest for the sublime. In Search of the Miraculous was conceived as a three-part project: a lonely nighttime walk from the hills of Los Angeles down to the sea, documented in photographs; the Atlantic crossing; a night walk through Amsterdam, mirroring the LA photographs.The circumstances of his disappearance have led many interpreters to identify Ader (as a person) with the role of the tragic romantic hero. The cult status of the artist as a hero whose work is authenticated through his death, however, has obscured the fact that Ader's art was a critical investigation of precisely those romantic motives his persona has now come to be identified with. This book unpicks these ties in Ader's work in order to highlight the specific and unique way in which Ader explores the existential and emotional with an artistic approach that is as conceptual and analytic as it is poetic and personal. Afterall Books are distributed by The MIT Press.

In Search of the Miraculous

Jan Verwoert

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